


Tumbling Steter

by pprfaith



Series: tumblr ficlets from hell [4]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: A Load of Angst, A Spot of Gore, A dash of Trauma, Alpha Peter, Alpha Peter Hale, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Always Female Stiles Stilinski, Angel!Stiles, Angels, BAMF!Peter, BAMF!Stiles, Canon Typical Violence, Claudia Stilinski Feels, Drabbles, Female Stiles Stilinski, Friendship, Future Fic, Gore, Grief, Guardian Angels, Hale Family Ouchies, Hale Pack, Hale family - Freeform, Insanity, Irreverent Attitudes toward Everything, M/M, Magic Stiles, Misogyny, Non-Human Stiles, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Derek Hale, Pack Politics, Past Violence, Pets, Pre-Murder Boyfriends?, Pre-Series, Pre-Slash, Rule 63, Sane Peter, Scott is a Failwolf, Snippet, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Stiles has a potty mouth, Stiles is a little cracked, Swearing, Time Travel, Turtles, Vampire Stiles Stilinski, Vampires, Violence, Werewolf Stiles Stilinski, Werewolves, a Sprinkling of Violence, assassin!Stiles, attempts at humor, darkish stiles, murder boyfriends, past character deaths, season one, some gore, sort of, these tags have gotten away from me, tumblr ficlets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-05-28 03:45:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6314089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What it says on the tin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Territorial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles and Peter doing the dirty work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stiles the emissary, Peter the enforcer, dealing with a threat to the pack. Throw a little hurt/comfort in for kicks ;) by capt-buckybarnes

+

“We did a good job today,” Scott announces, slinging an arm around Stiles’ shoulders, Derek-bought beer in hand, watching the rest of the pack lounge around the loft, talking, laughing. Being teenagers for once. Being careless, as they should be. 

Stiles nudges his elbow into Scott’s ribs in lieu of an answer, gets a dimpled, crooked grin in return. “I told you, killing isn’t the answer. The witch is gone, everyone’s fine, no-one died.”

Across the room, Peter is leaning against the table by the window, watching them both intently. Stiles rolls his eyes and the older wolf grins smarmily, all his teeth on blatant display. Scott growls low in his throat, the way he always does when Peter annoys him. Stiles nudges him again. Harder. “Yeah, yeah. Killing bad, talking good. I got it, Scotty.”

Honestly, he’s tired of Scott rubbing it in the way he has for the past… oh, three hours? And the entirety of last week because there was a swarm of pixies and Stiles recommended killing them. Scott didn’t and gloated. Before that it was vampires and before that Stiles doesn’t even remember. 

He’s not sure why he still offers an opinion at all when the pack asks. It’s not like they listen. True Alpha Scott McCall only has one setting and that’s obnoxiously naïve diplomacy. 

Stiles never thought he’s say this, but he kind of misses the days when Derek’s default setting was murder. Things got done back then. Badly and violently, but they got done. The new Derek, Disciple of Scott Derek, is like a toothless puppy in comparison. 

With a sigh, the token human squirms his way out from under Scott’s arm and puts down his empty beer. 

“I don’t know about you, but all the running after that witch was exhausting. I’m heading home. Call me tomorrow?”

He knows Scott won’t.

“Yeah, man, sure. Night.”

Stiles gathers his things, waves goodbye to the rest of the pack and bends down to receive Lydia’s peck on the cheek, then leaves. Gets in his jeep, drives two blocks, waits with the engine idling. 

Peter slides into the passenger seat five minutes later. They don’t talk. Stiles just puts the car into gear and they go.

They drive to the edge of the preserve and Peter picks up the witch’s scent effortlessly, leading the way at a loping run, barely slow enough for Stiles to keep the wolf in sight and not end up completely out of breath. 

They zigzag for a while, following the woman’s trail to the pack’s borders and then straight back into Beacon Hills because _of course_ she didn’t leave. They never do. Not once they figure out this territory, this precious beacon, belongs to a boy who will not kill. 

They close in on her on the bad side of town, and Peter puts on a burst of speed before she makes it within earshot of any humans. Stiles curses as he loses sight of his partner, speeds up as much as his tired human body will let him and knows it’s not fast enough.

A moment later, a crack like thunder splits the air, followed by a scream that’s half howl. 

Peter. Peter, Peter, Peter.

Stiles slams into the clearing with one hand in his bag, skids to a halt over Peter’s prone form, draws back and throws the little baggie at the bitch with full force, no hesitation. She barely has time to open her mouth, raise her hands in some kind of defense, before it slams into her and explodes like a grenade. Greyish green dust swirls around her and Stiles bites out sharp, angry Latin between clenched teeth, trapping her with mistletoe and intent. 

Then and only then does he look down to meet Peter’s gaze, blue and pained but alive. Healing. “Idiot,” he hisses, nudging his toes into the other man’s side. Gently. 

Peter snarls at him and Stiles blows him a kiss. “You’ll be alright.”

“Run faster next time,” is the answer. Yeah. Peter’s going to be just fine. 

“That was stupid,” he announces as he straightens, steps over the wolf, eyes narrowed, hand back in his bag, digging for another weapon. 

“You can’t touch me!” she wails, hands at her sides, ready for battle, no trace of the innocent, scared woman Scott fell for. “Your alpha promised me!”

Stiles snorts. Between him and Scott, Stiles was never the follower. She sneers in response, crouches slightly and starts chanting under her breath. He can feel her intent push against his, her will trying to overpower his. 

“Ah,” he chides, in his most obnoxious lecture voice, “but you broke the deal. You didn’t leave.” They never do. “And then you went and did something even more stupid. You hurt my wolf.”

Because Peter is. He is. 

Because Stiles killed him and saved him a dozen times over since then. Because he sees him when no-one else does and he knows him. He knows the man, he knows the monster, and he knows how fine the line between the two really is and he has never once flinched from either. Not at sixteen and certainly not now, with years of battle behind him. And Peter looks at Stiles and sees all those same things and that’s… more precious than just about anything else left in this world.

So Stiles gets a bit cranky when someone hurts Peter. Sue him. 

Behind him, Peter snorts but doesn’t argue the possessive pronoun. “Stiles,” he orders instead, a rustle of clothes and leaves and then he’s behind him, close enough to feel. Got to love werewolf healing. “Don’t play with your food.”

Stiles chuckles, a bit manic, a bit unhinged. A lot like a boy running with monsters. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

The gunshot is silent. The ring of runes around the barrel were some of the first magic he learned because he doesn’t need his dad’s deputies raining down on him when shit gets serious, but it’s still grotesque to watch the witch crumble without a sound. It’s like the wound just blooms from her chest without outside interference and then Peter is standing over the body, breaking her neck for good measure before hauling her up and over his shoulder once he’s sure she’s dead.

“The ravine?” he asks. 

“The ravine.” Obviously.

+

They put the corpse where they put all the corpses and then stand there, at the edge, staring down. 

“You’re thinking about McCall again,” Peter observes after a moment. He’s stripped off his bloody, torn shirt and is currently half naked. Evil, evil bastard. 

Stiles shrugs. “He’d freak if he knew.”

“Because he thinks his way works,” the older man offers. Kindly, almost. It’s an impending sign of the apocalypse, Stiles is sure.

“It doesn’t though.”

“He tells people to leave, they promise never to come back, they never do. From his perspective, it works. I’m afraid, sweet boy, that you do too good a job for your puppy to ever learn any better.”

And that’s the irony of it, isn’t it? Scott can live his dream of being a gentle alpha in a ruthless world because Stiles and Peter do his dirty work for him. And if he ever found out, he’d condemn them for it. Sometimes Stiles wonders if they’d get the same ultimatum as all the other monsters passing through, or if the betrayal of his best friend might finally be enough to get Scott to face reality. 

He sighs, shakes his head. For tonight, the evil witch is dead, the pack is safe at the loft and Peter is… still half naked and bloody.

He slings an arm around the wolf’s waist and turns them both away from the quarry. “Come on, creeper wolf. Take out and movies at your place. I’ll even let you pick the movies because you got hurt.”

“How kind of you,” Peter mocks, but noses at the human’s temple, presses a kiss into the soft skin there. 

“I’m the soul of kindness, you’ll find.”

“Gods no. You’d be terribly boring if you were.”

Stiles laughs. 

 

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt me at [my tumblr.](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/wordsformurder)


	2. Love me!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vampire Stiles courting Peter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dunno what you're into, but maybe stiles courting peter? stiles could be a supernatural creature of some sort so peter could be at first unaware what stiles was up to? By bxdcubes

+

So, Stiles came to Beacon Hills based on rumors. 

There’s a new pack there. It’s ruthless. It’s eradicated the largest tribe of hunters left in the Western world. It’s defeated a kanima. It’s battled beasts and monsters of lore. It accepts non-wolves. The alpha has connections to the local hospital, to the police force.

It sounded like every supernatural creature’s dream. A stable place with a decent enough community to not be lonely, connected to humans, but separate. And a leader ruthless enough to keep peace. 

Too good to be true. 

Obviously. 

The pack is made up of puppies, the Argents aren’t so much dead as assimilated and the vicious victories seem to have been flukes, more than any kind of skill. And the alpha’s mysterious connections?

Turns out his parents are a nurse and a sheriff, respectively. 

Because he’s a seventeen-year-old boy. 

And a stupidly naïve one at that. 

Don’t get Stiles wrong. He likes Scotty. The kid is fun to hang around, plays a wicked game of Halo and seems copacetic with the fact that Stiles likes to drink blood and hasn’t had a pulse in several centuries. 

But from a survival point of view, trusting an ancient vampire’s word that he’s only here to chill and will stick to blood bags, no worries, is really, really stupid. 

The only one who seems at all suspicious is the older one, Derek, and even he leaves off after only a few weeks. 

If Stiles were here to suck their virgins dry, they’d all be, well, _dry_. 

Whatever. 

He enjoys the vacation for a while, hangs out with the puppies, who match his physical age. He even tries high school for a spell because he hasn’t in a while and it helps in keeping up with the times. And he adores Malia and Erica.

It’s cool. Relaxing. 

He’s bored out of his mind within six months. 

And then, just as he’s trying to decide whether to leave or go on a murder spree, _he_ shows up. 

Peter Hale. 

Mostly omega, former alpha, former _dead man_ , comes slinking into a pack meeting on a random Tuesday in July, immediately gets glared at by all present, sniffs out Stiles’ state of dead within seconds and then starts to ruthlessly and very, very obviously flirt. 

In the creepiest way possible. There’s so much leering, Stiles feels the need to cover Scotty’s eyes and ears, lest it besmirch his virtue. 

“You’re a smarmy kind of dick, aren’t you?” he asks instead after the third suggestion on what Stiles could do with his mouth that Peter casually weaves into a conversation he’s not even part of.

Peter pouts. “And here I thought you might be fun.”

Stiles tucks his tongue behind his teeth and flashes a little fang. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”

“Gross, Stiles!” Erica hollers, smacking his arm. “He’s Peter. He’s a total creep and a serial killer and old!”

Malia’s nose wrinkles adorably. “And my sperm donor.”

Raising his hand, Stiles offers, “Hello, my name is Stiles. I’m several hundred years older than all of you taken together and he could spend the rest of his life killing a human a day and still not catch up to me.” He pauses. “The father thing is kind of weird, though.”

“But you don’t do that anymore!” Scotty protests.

“He’s still creepy!” Erica argues.

“You’re all hopeless,” Derek protests.

“How old exactly?” Lydia asks.

Malia just grins, pleased at being right. And since Stiles taught her how to high five last week, she holds up her hand expectantly. Erica obliges her.

“Have dinner with me,” Peter demands into the silence after they’ve all yelled over each other.

Stiles’ smirk grows wider. “It’d be my pleasure.”

+

They have dinner. 

And then they go for a walk.

And then they fuck. 

And they keep doing all three of those things because it’s fun to freak people out, the conversation is great and the sex is fantastic. Stiles has been straight-and-narrowing it for so long, he forgot how awesome it is to have a partner who can keep up and isn’t afraid of a little claw and fang. 

It helps that he genuinely likes Peter. They enjoy the same books, the same movies and even though the wolf is terribly, terribly young compared to Stiles, he has lived enough in his thirty-plus years to not be as annoyingly abrasive as most people. 

They share similar views on many things, including the pack, and it becomes their favorite past time – after sex – to bring popcorn to pack meetings and throw the occasional incendiary remark just to lean back and enjoy the show when it blows up and everyone goes nuts. Malia likes to join them on days when someone has been annoying her with human things.

Basically, as Erica summarizes in early fall, “You’re the same brand of asshole, go be creepy together somewhere else. And shower, for fuck’s sake!”

After Peter, Erica is Stiles’ favorite wolf. Malia is his favorite, too, but she’s a coyote, which is special. 

“Damn right I am.”

It’s a problem.

The liking Peter, not the liking the girls. Or Malia’s specialness.

Because Peter is an excellent distraction but Stiles is still very much over Beacon Hills. He’s not over Peter, though. 

He thinks he might need a century or two for that. 

But he’s not staying here, either. So what’s a boy to do?

+

Peter frankly adores Stiles. To a degree he didn’t think was possible anymore. And he abhors it. Because a majority of the pack thinks Stiles is two or three centuries old. Derek’s cautious guess is half a millennium. 

It took Peter all of three days of listening to the boy’s stories, listening to how he _speaks_ , and, incidentally, seeing him swing a broadsword, to figure out that they’re all way off the mark. Stiles, when properly turned on, swears on Perun.

Which leads Peter to the conclusion that the so-called boy predates Slavic Christianization and that… makes him very, very old. 

The werewolf is self-aware enough to know he must be a mayfly to the vampire. He can see it in the way Stiles looks at the pack, stops doing his homework, rarely talks to anyone but Peter, Malia and Erica (Boyd by extension) anymore. He’s getting ready to leave. The pack were, Peter thinks, a nice distraction from a lonely existence, but Stiles is far too brilliant to let himself be roped into McCall’s idea of supernatural paradise.

Which is why, when Peter wakes one morning to find an ancient book on the pillow next to him instead of Stiles, he takes it as a goodbye present. 

It’s at least four centuries old, handwritten, and details the life and times of an Italian alpha werewolf. It’s full of interesting bits of culture and customs and Peter remembers having more than one conversation with Stiles about werewolf society, pumping the older man for knowledge otherwise long lost to time. 

Stiles remembered. The book is perfect. Peter spends the next two days sleeplessly translating it, soaking up every singly syllable in it. As far as distractions go, it’s a wonderful one. 

On the third day after receiving the book, Peter is surprised to find Stiles on his doorstep. The vampire lets himself in, laughs at the state of the dining table – filled with paper, books, Peter’s laptop and a dozen empty coffee mugs – and then shoves the wolves into the shower. 

Right after, he whisks him away to an expensive and excellent dinner an hour’s drive away from Beacon Hills. 

“Why are you doing this?”

Stiles shrugs, something unreadable flashing in his gaze. “You missed a pack meeting,” he finally drawls. “It was your turn to bring the popcorn. Malia was desolate.”

Peter snorts. “If this is your way of punishing me for it, you’re not doing a very good job.”

The vampire waves one hand vaguely. “Oh, well.”

After dinner, it’s a show and then a walk through dark streets, which ends when Stiles takes a stupidly drunk co-ed into a dark alley for a snack. When he emerges, Peter offers him a hankie to wipe his mouth. It earns him a kiss and a beeline to a decadently wonderful hotel. Peter means to ask what Stiles is still doing here all night, but never quite manages. 

Instead, they talk about the book, about Italy, and then have another go at making one another pass out from pleasure. 

Stiles wins, as usual, and lies with his head on Peter’s stomach, listening to his insides rumble and pump. His own body is disconcertingly still. Peter cards one hand through Stiles’ mop of hair and marvels at the creature under his hands. 

“There’s an exhibition in Houston,” he says without really meaning to. “About the Christianization of Europe in the early middle ages.”

It’s as close to acknowledging the vampire’s age as they’ve ever gotten. Stiles smirks a little and closes his eyes, tapping the tattoo of Peter’s heartbeat onto his own sternum.

The next day, there are tickets to Houston and hotel vouchers in Peter’s mail. He gives up on understanding Stiles and resolves to just enjoy this drawn-out goodbye.

+

Stiles is slowly losing his mind. Peter loves all of his gifts but he doesn’t seem to get the idea. At all. 

After two weeks of this, Stiles is at his wit’s end, which leaves him with two options. Flat out declare his intentions – which he’s never been good at, ask the girl he was courting in his human days – or ask for help. 

Erica laughs so long and hard, she needs Boyd to hold her upright on her chair and really, that shade of red can’t be healthy. Malia makes retching noises for two minutes straight. 

In the end, it’s Boyd who’s the most help when he says, “What Peter has always wanted most is to be an alpha again.”

Oh. 

Of course. 

Okay. Okay. Stiles can work with that. 

+

There is a hog-tied, drugged and gagged formerly blind Demon Wolf on Peter’s living room floor.

He’s got a note taped to his forehead that reads, _Have Fun._

It’s not signed. Peter stares at it for five minutes before pulling it off, neatly folding it into his pocket and deciding that maybe, Stiles wasn’t saying goodbye after all.

+

“You have been courting me,” he announces as he lets himself into Stiles’ apartment, which looks suspiciously packed-up and emptied. 

Stiles, in the process of stacking books into a box, freezes.

“Yes?”

Peter can’t help flashing his newly red eyes as he steps up to the other man, trapping him between his own body and the empty shelves. “Is that a statement or a question?” he growls, possessive and hopeful and braced for disappointment.

But Stiles is transfixed by his eyes, stares at them with one hand raised, like he means to touch. “Oh,” he says instead of an answer, “Oh, you look gorgeous.”

“Stiles!”

Cold fingers trail over his temple, down his cheekbone and back up. “Mhm? Oh, yes. I have. About time you caught on. I was starting you think you were letting me down easy.”

“You could have _said_ something,” he growls, a wave of relief flooding him hard enough to make his knees feel weak. He means it. Stiles means it. He wants… he wants _Peter_.

Another hum. The vampire’s own eyes are slowly turning from whiskey brown to a pitch black in response to Peter’s fiery gaze. “Does that mean you’re coming with me?” he asks, tapping a finger to the corner of Peter’s left eye.

“Where are you going?” the alpha asks, trying and failing to mask the happiness in his voice. 

“Where do you want to go?”

+

Peter wants to go to Italy.

So to Italy they go. 

As a couple. As something as close to mates as it gets in the real world. They haven’t talked much about the future, but Stiles has made it very clear that there are ways around their different life expectancies and that it’s Peter’s choice. 

For now, though, they’re simply enjoying each other. 

During the day, Stiles takes his wolf to all the places he’s been before, seeing them through new eyes and loving every second of it. At night, Stiles hunts in the cities and Peter hunts in the woods and they find each other in the early hours of morning, sated and happy and fall into bed together until noon.

It’s fantastic. 

The only thing that makes it better is the doorbell ringing at ten pm, revealing Malia, Erica and Boyd. 

Peter’s daughter wrinkles her nose and announces, “Scott is a poophead and I don’t want to listen to him anymore.”

Boyd shrugs helplessly and Erica pushes past a stunned Peter, hollering, “Where do we sleep, Alpha?”

Peter blinks, speechless for once, and Stiles is suddenly really, really glad that he went to Beacon Hills. 

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt me at [my tumblr.](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/wordsformurder)


	3. Into the Woods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles is too clever for her own good. Season one derails.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rule 63!Stiles and Peter with it being Stiles not Scott that was bitten? By beccatdemon13

+

In hindsight, coming out here alone with a known killer on the loose – you know, one who _cuts his victims in half_ \- is a really, really shitty idea. Stiles is a tough girl, but she’s not exactly Xena and let’s face it, this guy probably won’t be all that impressed with her motor mouth.

At the very least, she should have taken Scott. The guy’s a potato, but he has impressive lung volume for a skinny asthmatic kid. He might have led the cops to her mangled body. But Scott’s been all lacrosse this, I’ll make first line that all damn summer and Stiles doesn’t want to hear it anymore. She was on the team last year, sure, because there’s no female lacrosse team, so the school board had to let her, but, like Coach said, “On the bench is on the team and if you think I’m risking a lawsuit to let you live out your dick complex, you’re nuts, Bilinski.”

So she quit at the end of last year. Scott didn’t. Because Scott was a bench warmer, too, but he’s not a girl, so hard work and some skill will actually get him out in the field, whereas all it’d get Stiles are more dyke jokes. 

So. Alone in the woods. Stupid. Hindsight. Always great when you live to implement it in your future exploits. Which Stiles might not have because there are a herd of deer coming straight at her in a panicked stampede and she’s running and tripping, of course she’s tripping, her life is a fucking cliché, she’s tripping and rolling down a hill and landing on something squishy and biting her lip to keep from screaming because, oh, hey, look, she found the body, she found the fucking _chopped in half_ body and the deer soar over her head, land, gallop on and Stiles is left with half a human being worth of dead meat and _whatever panicked the deer in the first place_.

Its eyes are red. 

Its eyes are red in the underbrush and that’s impossible because as far as she knows, only birds and albino bunnies actually have red eyes and none of them shine like lanterns in the dark.

Also, her friend Heather had an albino bunny growing up and it never sounded like it was hiding a chainsaw behind its back. Maybe that’s what it is. A maniac with a really weird flashlight and a chainsaw, randomly killing girls in the woods. That means she might stand a chance running away.

But Stiles, see, Stiles has always been a clever girl and those eyes are too low to the ground and that sound is a growl, not a chainsaw, and you don’t run from a predator.

Nor do you try to reason with in, but Stiles’ only defense has always been this, “Hey there, killer monster nightmare thing. I have no idea what you are and I really hope you’re not some douche trying to scare the fuck out of me because then this’d be super embarrassing, but please don’t kill me? My dad’s the Sheriff and my mom… my mom’s dead and he’s only got me left and knowing the Stilinski luck, he’d be the one to find my body and he wouldn’t… he wouldn’t take it well. When Mom died he almost drowned himself in booze and he needs me and if I’m gone, too, then he’ll… I don’t even know what he’ll do, so can you please not kill me? I now it was stupid to come out here and I probably deserve to get eaten, but please, please, don’t. I’ll walk out of here, I’ll tell no-one a thing, I can keep a secret and you can be on your way and you’re still growling, why am I trying to reason with some kind of hybrid super monster, it’s not like you can understand me.”

The… thing slinks forward, belly to the ground, ready to pounce, and Stiles catches a glimpse of claws, of black fur and immense muscle mass. A tail. Is that behemoth a fucking _wolf?!_

“There are no wolves in California,” she mutters to herself and the monster cocks its head to one side, curious. 

And then it lunges. 

+

Stiles wakes at dawn.

The ceiling above her is made of jagged, broken beams of wood, blackened and burnt. The floor is scraping her back raw, there are leaves in her hair and dirt in her mouth. And there’s a giant, slavering beast lying across her middle, pinning her down, its head resting on its folded forelegs, watching her with those red, red eyes. 

“I’m not dead,” she tells it. Surprised. 

She remembers the pain searing through her, the teeth in her flesh, being pinned down and _mauled_. She remembers – 

Her hand flies to her shoulder. The torn fabric of her shirt is stiff with dried blood but below it… the skin is unbroken. 

Nothing. She almost breaks her own neck trying to see down her back. Nothing. It’s like she was never bitten. Like – 

“Okay, no,” she tells the beast, who looks still impressive as fuck in the twilight, but not quite as monstrous anymore. Like a horror movie prop seen outside a scene. You still know what it’s for, but some of its magic is gone. 

Speaking of magic, Stiles really doesn’t like the impossible, convoluted skips and leaps her mind if making because, “You are not a motherfucking werewolf, there is no way, get the fuck out.”

It huffs, amused, and cocks its head again.

Well, fuck her. “You understand every word I say, don’t you?”

For a moment, there is no reaction. Then, a nod.

Heart beating out of her chest with some mixture of panic and amazement, Stiles realizes, “And you bit me.”

Another nod.

“Am I going to be like you?”

A nod. A headshake. Something like frustration across that weirdly expressive visage, followed by rage. Okay.

“Nevermind,” she dismisses. The wolf still hasn’t moved off her and she’s not willing to piss it off. “Was I out for more than that one night?”

Headshake.

“Okay, so Dad might not have noticed me missing, yet. If I make it home before breakfast – “

A growl. Okay. Alright. “No leaving?”

A nod. 

“I’ve been kidnapped by a preverbal werewolf. Fantastic. Should have stayed in fucking bed, Stiles.”

The wolf’s ears perk at the mention of her name. “Oh, yeah, hi, I’m Stiles. You got a name?”

No answer. Of course. But those red eyes flick up for a beat, toward something to their right. It looks involuntary, just a second, but Stiles sees it, cranes her neck to follow the flicker and finds something that might have once been a side table. Charred bits of wood and paper litter its surface. Pictures, she realizes, pictures in frames. Family pictures, probably. They’re in a burnt out house – the Hale house – and the wolf looked at the family pictures and there are three surviving Hales, Stiles know this, remembers Laura and Derek sleeping in the guest room for two nights before Laura, barely nineteen, grabbed her little brother and ran, terrified of something she refused to explain to the Sheriff. 

The third is in a coma and has been for years, but if werewolves are a thing and the whole family was made up of them, human rules might not apply and that means - 

“You’re Peter Hale.”

The reaction is instantaneous. A shudder runs through the beast from head to tail and a second later, a naked, scarred man is crouched over Stiles, still claw-tipped hands pushing her shoulders into the floorboards, fangs right in her face and those eyes. Those fucking eyes. 

“Oh,” the dead man above her rasps with a voice hoarse from six years of disuse, “You are a clever one, aren’t you?”

And Stiles, Stiles has her heart in her throat, her own blood caked on her hands and shoulder, Stiles is so terrified she can taste it, because there is a werewolf kneeling above her and it’s turned her into one and there is a body in the woods and nothing is ever going to be the way it was again, but. 

But the man holding her down, the man that’s more monster than man, the man who kidnapped her and hurt her and threatens her, he’s skinny as a rake, covered in dirt and blood and scars, hiding in the burnt-out shell of his home, where his entire family died and his eyes shine like lanterns but they’re also terribly empty and Stiles. 

Stiles has been mothering Scott for a decade, her own father almost as long, has dragged home every injured animal she’s ever found and always made her parents help them. Stiles, one might say, has always been fond of lost causes.

She wiggles one shoulder free – which she shouldn’t be able to do, he’s stronger than her, has got all the leverage, but it feels easy – wiggles it free, raises her hand and gently, slowly, cups the scarred cheek so close to her own.

Peter flinches like she slapped him, then abruptly goes almost boneless, toppling into her, burying his face in her neck, right where he bit. Like someone cut his strings. 

Stiles frees her other arm, and wraps both of them around him. Holds on. 

“Okay,” she says out loud into the silence, to him, to herself, to the ghosts in the walls. “Okay. We’re going to figure this out.”

Dad is going to kill her.

Under her hands, Peter starts shaking. 

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come prompt me [at tumblr.](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/wordsformurder)


	4. shield and sword

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guardian angel!Stiles watching over Peter. And doing one hell of a job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a steter prompt, maybe something guardian angel!stiles? And ofc he's sent to watch over Peter. Plz and thank you:) prompted by cywscross

+

Stiles loves his job as a guardian. He loves watching over people, helping them, keeping them safe. 

What he doesn’t love is the elitist bullshit that determines who gets a guardian and who doesn’t. Because not everyone has one, oh no. Only the people who matter. Only the ones that are important in some way, for fate, destiny, the universe at large. The ones that have roles to play.

That part is a bit shit. Or, you know, a lot. 

Because Stiles and his kind have been watching over humanity since the first ape decided to take an upright stroll through the woods and there’s no such thing as an unimportant human. 

People matter. 

All of them. Every single one Stiles has ever watched, charge or not, random stranger or not. They matter.

And even if some are unmitigated assholes, they’re still people. They _still_ matter.

So yeah, he’s not okay with this. 

“They’re not your charges, Stiles!” Scott argues, with an anguished expression that says he agrees with Stiles, but he also knows that it’s useless.

“They’re going to be burnt alive, Scott!” Stiles howls back, his attention half torn between his charge, one Peter Hale, Person Who Matters, his family, trapped in their home, and the argument he’s having with his best friend. 

“You can’t interfere! You know what’ll happen!” Scott windmills his arms, concern written across his features. He’s playing devil’s advocate and he hates it, but he’s always been the one to reign Stiles in, even if he doesn’t like it. 

They’ve had this fight before, a dozen times over, and usually, this is where it ends. Stiles sighs and shakes his head, cries, sometimes, and then saves his charge and does nothing to help the other humans in danger. 

Usually. 

But this time is different. This time, his charge is Peter Hale. 

Peter, who is sarcastic and sharp, who sometimes does bad things in the name of his family, Peter, who loves books and laughs at the wrong places in movies. Peter, who Stiles watched being born, growing up, runt of the litter, almost twenty years younger than his oldest sibling, half-forgotten among the nieces and nephews only a few years younger than him. Peter, who loves his pack anyway, who adores them with every fiber of his being, despite all that, who is banging against a mountain ash barrier even now, heedless of the flames everywhere, trying to save them because without them, life isn’t worth living. Peter, who is clever and loyal and terrible and Stiles….

Well. 

Stiles has always disagreed with the Rule. But he’s never thought about breaking it for anyone other than Peter.

Their powers work in a funny way, when you get right down to it. They exist in the present, here and how, as surely as if they were any other creature in the universe. But they aren’t flesh, aren’t corporeal, and a part of them, a third half of their being, is also, always, five minutes in the future. Reaching.

You need to know what’s coming in order to avert it. 

Stiles knows what he’s supposed to do. Grab Peter as he passes out, haul him out of the flames and away from the blocked escape route through the basement, hide him from the prowling hunters, then reveal him to the arriving police and medical professionals. That’s Peter’s way out. It’s how he survives.

It’s how the universe stays on track and fate plays out.

It’s how everyone else dies.

But there’s a difference between living and surviving and Stiles knows that his charge would rather be dead than alive and alone. He knows it, because it’s how Stiles feels, too, and they’re so, so much alike, him and this brief wolf. 

The only difference between them is that all the people Stiles loves are immortal, almost all-powerful creatures from before time and Peter’s loved ones….

They burn. 

In a few short minutes, the fire will reach temperatures too hot for even werewolves too heal and they will start suffocating. Not in time to avoid burning alive. The humans are already barely holding on, shielded by their more durable family members, who take the pain with stoic determination to protect their own those few moments longer. 

This is the point where Stiles should act. Do his job. Peter. No-one else. 

But he can’t. Not this time. Not when Peter is ruining himself trying to get to his pack, not when they’re sacrificing themselves for each other, not when they are mortal and dying and so, so brilliant. He smiles at Scott, who has been his best friend, his brother, since they were little more than ideas in primordial mud, and Scott knows him far too well, because his eyes widen in realization a split second later. 

“Stiles, no-“

Too late. 

Stiles spreads his wings, shoves from one plane to the next and slams into reality with a sonic boom that shakes the surrounding trees and sends humans and wolves alike to their knees, screaming. 

Peter howls and immediately, Stiles draws himself inward, makes himself smaller, dimmer, duller, less. As human as he can, light and intent that he is. He shoves himself into skin and bone, or an approximation thereof. It turns out to be harder than he remembers, but then, it’s been a few eons. 

As soon as he’s small enough and solid enough, he runs. As soon as he has a mouth, he screams, “Peter, get out of the way!”

His voice echoes with the screeches of eagles and the cries of wolves. Peter roars in agony.

Whoops. 

Try again. 

“Move, Peter!”

When the wolf doesn’t, Stiles grabs him by the collar and hauls him backwards, to safety, reaches for the blocked door and rips the mountain ash barrier out of existence, then wrenches the heavy metal door aside and grabs the woman who practically lands in his arms around the waist. He shoves her into Peter, then grabs for the next, the next, the next, plunges into the burning basement, picks up the ones already too weak to move and starts carrying them out. One by one, he saves the Hales, repairing the damage to his vessel as he goes.

The others get a move on and by the time he gently lifts the last ones – a human woman curled around her pregnant belly and the baby clutched in her arms – the basement is empty. 

Outside: screams. 

He moves.

As soon as it’s safe, he places the woman gently on the ground, where she is immediately covered by the rest of the wolves. They have rounded up their wounded within a few moments and everyone able to stand is facing the hunters aiming guns at them, a circle of protection around their weakest, even though none of them are at their strongest now. 

Peter is at the very front, at his sister’s side, snarling through bloody teeth, burnt hands flexed into claws, even as one of his teenaged nieces is drawing the pain from him with a hand on his back. Her little brother, human by the looks of it, is propping her up.

Tell Stiles again that these people aren’t worth saving. He dares you. Tell him. 

He takes the situation in in a blink, feels how much easier it’s already becoming to hold this form, to be this body, and knows he has to be fast. 

He pushes past the werewolves, shoves a growling, blue-eyed Peter gently aside and then faces the blonde woman who caused all of this.

“Kate Argent,” he says, and this time his voice seems to work, because the people around him only flinch and don’t scream. 

“Who the hell are you?” she asks. 

He waves her off. “Put your weapons down.”

She laughs. So do her comrades.

Okay. Corporeal or not, he still moves faster than light and between one instant and the next, he’s in front of her, her little metal weapon in his hand, her neck neatly broken. The five men with her follow her a blink later.

Then the two hiding in the trees. 

None of them even have time to scream.

He touches their bodies as they fall and they turn to light and stardust, turn to nothing. He would have liked to save them, but they made their choice. After that, he pulls the fire from the wood and stone and metal of the house, with one hand, soothes, fixes with the other. When the building it returned to what it was, damage erased, quickly, quickly, he turns toward the humans and wolves.

Burns heal, lungs stop aching, babies stop crying. Eyes bleed back to human as the pain fades. Hair and clothes fix themselves, catastrophe in reverse, until everything and everyone is as they were, staring at him with some cross between awe and terror.

Like it never happened. 

Even the grass looks untouched under their feet and Stiles sways, feels himself settle and sink into flesh, feels – 

Dizziness.

He’s pretty sure this is what dizziness is. 

A second later he tastes copper and that is blood. He has blood. Cool. It comes from his nose and he licks it off his lips and then he’s on his knees and someone – Peter, oh, Peter – is next to him, keeping him from toppling face-first into the ground.

He has a face now. 

In the distance, sirens howl and he curses, reaches for them, for the minds with them, but he can’t. There’s nothing – there isn’t – 

The future fades from his grasp like mist, evaporates into nothing and Stiles feels… less. Lost. Adrift. 

Small. He didn’t finish. He didn’t - 

A warm breeze ruffles his hair, suddenly, soothes the pains of a failing system. Restores his shoddily made body to something durable. Makes it better. 

A moment later, the sirens stop. The minds with them – Stiles can barely feel them anymore, like fading lights, they’re leaving him – turn around. 

_Idiot_ , a voice below reality murmurs and Stiles closes his eyes. Scott. Of course. 

“Thank you,” he whispers and feels stupidly grateful. He should have known Scott wouldn’t leave him like this. 

His own voice has lost its echo.

 _Do you regret it?_ More curious than judgmental, because oh, there’s a reason Stiles loves Scott so very much.

He looks toward the huddled, confused Hales, to Peter, his face impossibly close and he’s beautiful. Stiles has never seen him like this before, with limited, human vision. His soul is entirely hidden from view now and all he is, is flesh and bone and fragility and it’s gorgeous. 

“No,” he tells Scott. “I don’t.”

Sadness. Compassion. Love. A pause. _I can’t do any more._ His voice is already fading, becoming tinny. Distant. Harder to hear. _Goodbye, Stiles._

And then he’s gone. 

“Who the hell are you talking to? Who are you?”

Peter. Peter’s voice. It’s fantastic, even through the migraine. At least, Stiles thinks this is a migraine. It hurts. 

He laughs anyway and reaches a shaky hand up, touching his charge’s face. “You’re amazing,” he mutters. Skin. Skin feels brilliant. 

Peter smirks. “I know.” The expression drops. “Now answer the question.” Ever the protector.

Sigh. “I was your guardian.”

Around them, utter silence falls. “It was my job to protect you, so I did. And everyone else, too, because you wouldn’t want to live without your pack, even if they aren’t always nice to you. So I saved them and fixed everything.”

Peter’s face is a curious thing, so expressive even without his soul’s light. Scorn. Surprise. Naked fear. Doubt. Wonder.

“You… did all of this… for me? You’re a guardian angel?” He stutters, stumbles, then pulls himself together, pulls his masks back in place. Stiles wants to cry for him to stop that, stop hiding. He’s been watching for almost thirty years. He knows. There is no need for this. But Peter doesn’t know him. To Peter, Stiles is entirely new. The thought makes him feel like grieving. 

“Am I really supposed to believe that?” the wolf asks, scornful as ever, persona firmly in place.

Behind him, his sister stirs. “Peter…”

“Angel?” Stiles frowns, because it’s better to focus on that part, than on the fact that Peter doesn’t know him at all. “Oh, right. Christian civilization. I guess you could call me that, if you wanted. I’m far older than your god, though. But, no.”

“No what?”

Peter still hasn’t let go of him, despite the sharp tone in his voice. Stiles likes that. Maybe, somehow, the werewolf does know him. Maybe he felt all those times Stiles almost, almost, took shape, just to touch him. 

“No, I’m not a guardian angel.”

“But you just said so!” a teenage girl pipes up and a moment later, they’re surrounded. The pregnant woman brushes her hand over Stiles’ shoulder with a smile, her baby sat on her hip. Her eyes shine with gratitude. Peter snarls. 

“I was,” Stiles nods. “I’m not anymore.”

“Why not?” The alpha asks.

“Because I broke the rules. Peter was supposed to live. You weren’t.”

Gasps. Sobs. Cries of outrage and shock. Resignation, followed by weary looks into the surrounding woods. How does it feel, to know that the world wants you dead?

An old woman, human, gnarled and crooked like an old tree, cocks her head to one side and asks, gently, leadingly, “And you saved us anyway?”

“Peter needs his pack,” he answers, because, duh. It’s not that hard, isn’t it?

Peter huffs, but doesn’t contradict him. He wouldn’t. “So you came swaning down here, saved us all, repaired the house, killed all the hunters and erased them from existence, just because of… Uncle Peter?”

Stiles doesn’t like the way the orange-eyed girl says that. He scowls at her. “Yes,” he snaps.

“So why are you not an angel anymore?”

“I told you. I broke the rules.”

“What are you now?” The teenage boy, scowling fiercely.

That’s the fun question, isn’t it? Stiles looks down at his hands, his body. No light. No glow. Behind him, no wings. Inside him, nothing but organs and blood and weird, squishy bits. He listens to his heart beat, prods his lungs. 

“I think,” he tells them, and his own voice is so empty. “I think I’m human. I – “

He touches his cheeks, pokes at his eyes. Hurts himself. There’s something damp on his fingers. “Am I crying?” he asks the group at large. He thinks he sounds lost.

Peter is suddenly a lot closer, his arms around Stiles’ new shoulders – bare and goose-pimpled, is this cold? – and… hugging him. This is how corporeal creatures hug, isn’t it? It feels nothing like a real hug, soul to soul and feathers to spare, but it’s warm and soft and tingly anyway. 

Stiles hides his face in Peter’s neck.

Above their heads, one of the younger kids asks, “Did an actual angel just fall from heaven because of Uncle Peter?”

Stiles is going to have to do something about the way they all say ‘Uncle Peter’ with such disbelief and a hint of derision. In a moment. For now, he lets his human body shake in his charge’s arms and listens to Peter whisper in his ear, over and over again, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he mutters into warm skin, glad that Peter isn’t letting go. 

He means it. 

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come prompt me at my [tumblr](http://wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


	5. do not go gentle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Scott gets proven wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> how about stiles and scott go to a negotiation with hostile supernaturals and they reveal the fact that the mccall pack has a reputation for being ruthless and that stiles/peter are responsible for it, and they seal the deal out of fear/respect. basically i want scott to get his come uppance that his way doesn't work. By sammie-smiles

+

When the Carver pack agrees to meet with the McCall pack to talk about an alliance, Derek is honestly surprised. Even his mother always had problems getting the Carvers to sit at a table and talk.

“They follow the old ways,” she told him once, when he asked. “Blood and claw. They think we’re weak, because we do things the human way. They think,” she paused, parsed her words, “they think we are animal before we are human.”

“That’s not true, though,” Derek argued, confused.

She ran a hand through his hair and smiled. “For some of us, it is.”

Derek thought of Peter without really knowing why, in that moment, so long ago. He understands now, of course. Peter was wolf long before he was human. Peter, he decides, the Peter of today, with so much blood on his hands and no soul in his eyes, Peter would have been better off with the Carver pack. 

They’re a lot like him. Blood and claw. 

So no, Derek has no idea why they agreed to meet with Scott, who is the epitome of all that is human in their kind. Scott is everything Derek tries so hard to be and never quite manages.

“I don’t like this,” he mutters en route to the meeting, jaw tight. 

Scott, in the passenger seat, shrugs prosaically. “Maybe they’ve realized that their way doesn’t work anymore. Maybe they’re willing to try a new way.”

Behind him, Stiles snorts. He doesn’t agree with Scott. At all. And he’s been against this meeting since the beginning. 

Beside him, Peter heaves a sigh and, like he doesn’t want to, proclaims, “The Carver pack doesn’t meet with anyone they don’t respect. And they only respect violence. For them to want to meet, something has to be fishy. Do you want to die, McCall?”

Peter isn’t even supposed to be here, just the alpha, his first beta and his emissary, but you try telling Peter no. Short of crushing both his legs and chaining him to a wall, there was no way to stop him from coming along. Derek suggested that option, actually, only for Stiles – Stiles! – to snarl at him. Stiles, who has been spending too much time with Peter, who had that look in his eyes, that cold, hard look, even back at the beginning, long before he ever got near Peter. Stiles is human, all of him, down to the bone, but his ferocity has scared Derek for as long as he has known the kid. 

Stiles nods along to Peter’s words.

But Scott just smiles, blind as always to his best friend’s deficits. “Maybe they need help.”

This time, Peter is the one snorting. In the rear view mirror, Derek sees him and Stiles exchange guarded, resigned looks. Weird. 

He parks the car and they walk the last half mile, arriving at the designated clearing to find Alex Carver already in place, his own emissary and second fanned out behind him. He frowns when he counts four heads instead of three and Stiles steps forward with a jaunty wave. Peter falls in directly behind him and Derek clenches his jaw even tighter because even if Scott has no idea what that means, Derek does. 

Peter just aligned himself with Stiles, saying, very clearly, that he isn’t here as his own person, but an extension of Stiles. The same way Stiles fell in behind Peter a time or two over the past few months. The way bonded couples do. The way mates do. 

Derek doesn’t think they’re either, not yet, but the way they move in each other’s space and bicker like an old married couple, the way Stiles has stopped showing up to pack meetings if Peter isn’t invited… well. 

So Peter falls in behind Stiles and Stiles falls in next to Scott – not ever a step behind, not ever submissive, Scott should fight that but he doesn’t even notice – and Alpha Carver relaxes, getting the message. 

He turns to the True Alpha. “Alpha McCall,” he begins. “Thank you for meeting with us.”

Scott nods. “Of course. Why are we here?”

Carver is a burly man in his late thirties, built like a tank. His forearms are littered with tattoos – a very clear signal among wolves. Do not fuck with him, he sets himself on fire for fun. His packmates aren’t any less intimidating.

And right now, all of them are smiling. With teeth. They smell half pleased, half disgusted and Derek can’t figure why. Can’t understand why, under all that, there is a whiff of… fear? Caution, perhaps. They are careful of Scott, of this pack. Guarded. 

“Because,” Carver finally announces after a too long silence, “you’ve impressed me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.”

Scott allows a little smile of his own. He smells pleased and Derek makes a mental note to go over how to disguise his scent with the alpha. Again. It’s not a perfect method, but right now, Scott’s pleasure is flooding the clearing to an overwhelming degree. Everyone else’s scents are muted.

“Your reputation has been preceding you for a while. We were content to wait and see if you made it, but you’ve forced our hand, haven’t you? Giving us a gift like that.”

Scott frowns, his scent plummeting. “What gift?”

Carver echoes the frown, smelling the confusion suddenly tinging the air. 

“The fae,” his emissary, a slender woman with a mean face explains. “They killed three of our young and then fled into your territory. A week later, we found their bodies at our borders. That was you, wasn’t it?”

Before the True Alpha can do more than open his mouth to stutter indignation – they talked to those fae and they promised to leave their land, promised not to harm anyone, Scott didn’t _touch them_ \- Stiles steps forward. 

Seeing as how the Carver Emissary spoke first, it wouldn’t even look strange to the other pack, the way he answers her. Wouldn’t, if he didn’t elbow Scott in the ribs as he passes and then stomp on his foot for good measure. 

“Yes,” he announces, directing his words at his equal. “That was us. We heard what they cost your pack and thought it was only fair to let you know justice was served. And if we become allies, then borders won’t stop you from getting your own justice in the future.” He smiles. It looks all wrong. 

Carver looks between the two teens with shrewd eyes, but Scott, despite being bug-eyed and obviously bursting to start yelling, keeps quiet. He’s learned that much, that conflict belongs behind closed doors in the pack, not where others can smell the weakness and use it. 

He nods along with Stiles, puts a hand on his shoulder and spouts platitudes until they’ve agreed on a basic mutual-aid agreement.

Three days’ worth of consideration for both sides, then they’ll meet again. 

The Carver pack arrived first so they leave first, as per custom. Alpha at the head, then emissary and first beta. The beta stops after a few steps and speaks for the first time. “You know, we never thought you’d make it, kid. When you took over, rumors were flying about you trying to talk to people, be diplomatic, give second chances. We thought we could simply outwait you and take over the land when you’re all dead. But you surprised us. Respect for that.”

He nods and then disappears after his alpha, unaware of the point he just hammered home so brutally. 

They wait, perfectly silent, until the other pack is far, far away. Then Scott takes three steps back from Stiles – and Peter, always also Peter – and grinds his teeth. “How long?” he spits.

Stiles meets his anger with relaxed shoulders and open hands, a mask of defenselessness that has never been true. “How long what, Scotty?”

“How long have you been going against my orders and… _killing_ people? People I promised safe conduct?!”

The human shrugs. “Don’t be like that, man. When have I ever done what you told me to, huh? I mean, ever? I did what I had to keep you safe, just like I always have.”

He doesn’t cajole and he doesn’t plead for forgiveness and Derek realizes he can’t remember the last time Scott and Stiles hung out, or arrived for a pack meeting together, or even just knew personal details of each other’s lives before the rest of the pack did.

“Stiles, you killed people! You’re _killing_ people!” 

For a moment, Stiles looks hurt. Then it passes. Peter steps up behind him, presses his chest to the teen’s back, a solid wall. A united front. And Stiles shakes his head. “I’m keeping us all safe. This is no different from beating up Jackson for taking your inhaler in second grade.”

“Yes it is! People are dead because of you!”

Low blow. And Stiles, never one to pull his punches, volleys back, “Because you wouldn’t fucking do your job!”

Scott cringes. “I am doing my job! I’m trying. I’m doing the best I can!”

A sneer. “Well, your best isn’t fucking working. Your best turned Beacon Hills into the laughing stock of the supernatural world. The little alpha who couldn’t! The reason every critter in the continental US was suddenly headed for us wasn’t because of the Nemeton! It was because of you, Scott! Because you painted a fucking target on us. On our town! I was only cleaning up your fucking mess!”

He’d say more, but Peter slings an arm around his shoulders and neck, tugs him backwards a bit, and he stops. He stills and Peter looks Scott dead in the eye and adds, “Your way wasn’t working. We did what any good enforcer does. We picked up the slack. It’s not our fault that there was so much slack to pick up, Scott. That’s on you.”

Then he hauls Stiles into his side and walks the two of them back to the car. 

The silence is deafening.

After a long minute, Scott follows and Derek trails after him, bereft. He really thought – he hoped – he wanted Scott’s way to work. He wanted there to be a way for them to live without the violence, without the constant fear and pain and he thought – 

But it was an illusion. Because while Scott was letting everyone go, Stiles and Peter were picking them off after hours. 

Scott’s way never worked. Their peace was always built on blood. 

The drive home is made in icy silence, Stiles’ fingers white-knuckled on the wheel. Scott can’t look at him and Derek can’t look at Scott. Peter won’s stop glaring at them both. Stiles counts oncoming cars under his breath and goes thirty over the speed limit. 

It’s weird, Derek thinks, how quiet it is. Almost peaceful, except for the stench of anger and grief. 

All the endings in his life have been loud, bright, painful. Fire and blood. But this one, this one is entirely silent. 

Peter turns on the radio somewhere in the middle of the woods. It emits only static.

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come prompt me over [here](http://wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


	6. Into the Woods II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A continuation of [Into the Woods](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6314089/chapters/14506051).

Eventually, Stiles does make it home. Just in time to change into non-bloody clothes, grab her bag and be five minutes late to school. On the first day of the year, too. 

Scott shoots her all kinds of looks, but she just flashes him a smile and fibs him off with something about overdosing on her meds again, nothing to worry about. 

She’d tell him, but she’s still not sure she believes it and, hell, fire and dead people and chopped-up bodies indicate that this might be more dangerous than cool and Stiles is a motherfucking _werewolf_ now.

Also, the last thing Peter said to her before reluctantly letting her out of his sight was, “Be careful,” with a sort of manic, desperate urgency in his voice that told her far, far too much. 

She’ll tell Scotty once she’s sure it’s safe for him to know.

Until then, well. She makes it until lunch. Then he’s suddenly there, brow furrowed. “Stiles? Why is there blood behind your ear?”

She slaps a hand over the spot, scratches at it and yep, that’s definitely dried blood. “Mosquito?”

Usually, she’s a good liar. Really. It’s just, well, werewolves. 

“What did you do?” He asks, warily, eyes big. 

“Nothing! It was a really big mosquito!”

“Stiles!” She’ll need to give him something, won’t she?

She slaps his arm, hauls him out of the queue and hisses, “Shut up, I might have gone looking for the body. I tripped, bled and didn’t get any sleep. Happy now?”

“What body?”

“The body they found in the woods last night. Nevermind! Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“You went without me?” He sounds wounded, but then his gaze switches to something behind her and when Stiles turns, she sees a new girl, dark-haired and graceful in a way Stiles will never be, sitting next to Lydia Martin.

“Who’s she?” she asks.

“That’s Allison,” Scot answers, stars in his eyes. “I lent her a pen.”

“Did you talk to her?”

And then he’s off rambling about the new girl, completely forgetting that Stiles a) lied to him and b) never answered his question and she loves him, she really does, but she is never going to commit crimes with Scott because god knows, he’d get them arrested within minutes. 

+

After school, she showers in the locker rooms because closer inspection revealed more dried blood down her back and side and, well, it started smelling at one point. Scott bikes off after the final lesson with a dazed expression on his face, and his heart beating Allison, Allison, Allison.

Only not literally, because Stiles can hear heartbeats now. She can hear Coach mucking around in his office and that Jackson is jacking off in the boys’ locker, which, eugh, no! She can hear the cars leaving the lot on the other side of the school and there – 

At the edge of the woods behind the lacrosse field, a heartbeat like a drum, louder, louder, louder, until she has to press her hands over her ears to get away from it, but she can’t, can’t, can’t because it’s vibrating down to her bones that sound and getting louder still, coming closer, closer, coming so close until – 

“Stiles,” someone says and there are hands on her shoulders and cold tiles under her ass because she’s sitting in the communal showers, hands over her ears like a child, whimpering and Peter, that’s Peter, Peter’s face and Peter’s scars and Peter’s scent. 

Peter’s eyes, red like rubies and blood, blood caked on her skin, and Scott and school and Dad and – 

“Stiles, focus on my voice. Focus on me, now listen to my heartbeat. Hear it?”

It’s all she can hear, like a freight train battering at her eardrums and that’s a weird image, isn’t it, freight trains don’t batter, they whistle; Peter’s heartbeat is a war drum, deafening and deep, and it makes her think of the Lord of the Rings and Moria and hobbits and that makes her thinks of watching movies with Scott late at night and pizza and warm blankets and home and slowly, slowly, she blinks her eyes open.

When Peter’s eyes aren’t red, they’re blue with little flecks of rust in them. 

“You’re eyes are weird,” she tells him and slowly, experimentally, takes her hands off her ears.

Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. 

They’re sitting in the girls’ locker room, Peter on a bench, her in Peter’s lap. She’s naked, dripping wet and blushing furiously.

“Clothes,” she hisses as she tries to leap to her feet. “Clothes, clothes, oh my god, where are my clothes, I-“

Peter doesn’t let her up. Instead he reaches behind himself, comes up with a random towel and wraps it around her before slinging both arms around her waist and burying his face in her neck. He doesn’t seem to give a fuck about her being naked. 

“We are shapeshifters. Nudity is par for the course, my dear,” he rumbles into her shoulder and she said that out loud, didn’t she?

“You have been talking for the past five minutes.” His voice is still hoarse, but it sounds better already. 

Stiles… Stiles forces her internal monologue the fuck back down and takes stock. She’s out of that weird… zone she fell into. It was like a total overload and Peter… Peter fixed it somehow. By giving her a focus. Okay. She tunes into his heartbeat because she knows that works and keeps going. She’s naked. She should be mortified. But Peter is warm and holding onto her tightly and he’s not being a creeper about it and it’s comfortable. 

Way too comfortable, actually. Cuddling naked with a stranger should not be _any_ shade of comfortable. 

“I think,” she says, slowly, testing out the words, “We need to talk.”

+

He takes her back to the house, the burnt-out shell of a home and Stiles bites back on all kinds of twisted feelings and settles for leaning her shoulder against his briefly, before following him inside. 

“What do you want to know?” he asks, once he’s curled himself into a semi intact arm chair, leaving the mattress in the corner for her. 

“Everything.”

+

Three hours later, she regrets that decision fiercely. Because Peter – there’s something wrong with Peter, beside the obvious. He’s a little bit like a kid, with something inside of him just _broken_. She says she wants to know everything and so he tells her, no filter, no editing, no holding back. He doesn’t know her at all, she’s just a random kid he bit in a fit of madness, but he came for her and he calmed her down and saw her naked and when she says she wants to know everything he doesn’t even consider not giving it to her.

Stiles thinks he’s maybe not thinking straight, at first, but as his story progresses, she realizes it’s desperation. He doesn’t care that she’s a stranger, that she’s just a girl, that she might turn around and try to kill him for what he did to her. She’s there. She’s there and he honestly doesn’t seem to care about anything else. 

She gets it. He’s the oops baby of his generation, too young to belong with his siblings (dead anyway), too old to belong with his nieces and nephews (also mostly dead). They all burned while he was out and when he came back, he battered himself to pieces to save them because they were his pack, his family, _his_ , but it was no use (dead anyway). 

The coma and the hospital and Laura and Derek left, they were left and he could feel them, even as he way (dead anyway), could feel them and he hurt, he hurt so badly, but they were still there and then they weren’t (not dead but gone). 

“They abandoned me, Stiles, and I was left to rot in the dark, alone.”

“But you healed.”

The nurse who was kind only because she wanted something, open windows at the full moon, madness and rage and animal instincts with no-one to reign them in. Laura. 

He makes no secret of who Stiles found last night. Laura. Alpha. Not alpha. She abandoned Peter and for that – Stiles doesn’t think she deserved to die, exactly, but she also doesn’t mourn the girl she barely knew. Loyalty. That has always been Stiles’ only compass. She’s loyal to those she loves and that’s as moral as she gets. Laura wasn’t loyal. 

And that new thing inside of Stiles, the thing of fur and claws, stretches lazily and thinks, _not pack_. 

Apparently, her brand new apex predator agrees with her. 

Good to know. 

He killed Laura, let himself get taken over by the power and then there she was, stupid, fearless and clever.

“Of course I bit you. Who wouldn’t want to keep you, clever thing that you are? You’re already doing so much better than any bitten I have ever met and you’re all _mine_.”

Should be alarming. 

Is strangely flattering instead. 

There might be something wrong with Stiles. Like, beyond the obvious. Homicidal older men kidnapping her should not make her feel warm and fuzzy.

“I’d say that’s your wolf speaking,” Peter answers and she was babbling again, wasn’t she? “But you were quite human last night and no less amazing. I was overwhelmed by instinct, by the need to bite _someone_ , but choosing you was,” he searches for a word, licks his lip. His scars twist, weirdly mobile. “Perfect.”

She could fight this. Should. But Stiles learned inevitability at her mother’s hospital bed at the age of six, so she sighs and files it away for now. Peter stands, walks over to her and wraps himself back around her. 

“You are mine,” he whispers into her hair. “My wolf, my pack, my creature. And you will be loyal to me because I am your alpha. But I will also be loyal to you, because you are my beta. We are pack now, sweet girl, and that means I will never leave you, or hurt you, or discard you. That’s not so bad is it?”

Taking a deep breath, in and out, Stiles asks, “What happens next?”

+


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peaceful_fury asked for Stiels petsitting for Peter and then refusing to give the animal back. 
> 
> I bet you thought I couldn't turn that prompt angsty, didn't you?

+

“No!” Stiles cries, grabbing Bartholomew the turtle and pressing him to his chest.

“Stiles,” Peter snaps. “Return my turtle!” He’s too tired for the boy’s shenanigans tonight. 

“No! He likes it better with me!”

“He is a turtle, how the hell would you tell?”

With a sniff, Stiles turns Bart around in his hands and asks him, very seriously, “You like me, don’t you?”

Bart keeps chewing the piece of carrot Stiles bribed him with. 

“See, he likes me. He wants to stay with me. I don’t randomly abandon him to skip town for a month and dump him on unsuspecting people’s doorsteps with nothing but a goddamn note!”

So that’s the reason for Stiles’ mood. Peter almost groans. “Cora needed help, as I told you. It was an emergency.”

Outwardly, Stiles doesn’t soften at all. But a bit of his aggressive scent fades, leaving him more grumpy than actually mad. 

“But I want to keep him. What are you doing with a turtle anyway? You’re totally not a pet person. At least not if that pet can’t, like, eat people’s face off.”

“That’s what Derek’s for,” Peter quips and reaches for Bart again. 

Stiles jerks backward and cuddles the reptile close again, hunching over him like a momma bear. Peter wants to strangle him a little. 

“My turtle, Stiles.”

“No.”

“Stiles!” he can feel his eyes flashing electric blue and finally the boy registers that this isn’t funny anymore. His disgruntled scent is overpowered by something far worse: curiosity.

He frowns and his voice loses some of its whiney undertone as he asks, “No, seriously. You’re not a pet person, Peter.” There’s no question mark at the end, but he clearly expects an answer. 

Peter grinds his teeth. “Give me that goddamn turtle, before I take a page out of my nephew’s book and tear your throat out.”

Of course, this being Stiles, that’s the completely wrong thing to say. Really, all Peter want is to go home, shower and climb into bed to lick his still-healing wounds and pretend he wasn’t just a means to an end to his last living niece. That she called him for help because she wanted to, not because she had no choice. 

He wants his fucking turtle back. 

But Stiles smells weakness more accurately than any werewolf and his eyes narrow dangerously. “Why.”

Again, not a question.

“Stiles – “

“No, you’ve got me curious now. Before, this was a case of you having a weird pet. Now you’re emotionally invested in a turtle. Hate to break it to you, dude, but you’re not even all that emotionally invested in your own damn family. So tell me what gives and you can have him back.”

There is… a blip in his heartbeat, when he says Peter’s not invested in his own family. Like he knows that Peter, for all his faults and vitriol, would still, wants to – 

“He belonged to Lucy,” he says, through clenched teeth, because he knows Stiles, this wonderfully ruthless child, and he knows the boy won’t stop until Peter tells him what he wants to know. 

Usually, these games are fun. But he’s tired. 

“Lucy?” Stiles frowns briefly. “Cora’s twin?” Of course he’s know that. Once upon a time, Cora and Stiles were in the same grade. Them, and Lucy. Sweet little Lucy, who had all of Cora’s fire and none of her hardness. Or maybe that’s just Peter reading into it. She’s been dead for longer than she was alive now, almost. And Cora… Cora wasn’t always as she is now, was she?

The fire burned parts of all of them. 

“I gave her Bart for her sixth birthday. He was at the vet’s when the fire happened,” he tells Stiles, because the secret is already told now.

“Deaton kept him?” It sounds doubtful. They both agree on what to think about Alan Deaton and his usefulness. 

Peter snorts. “That would require loyalty. No. But he did find him a family. I tracked him down and bought him back from his new owners.”

For a long minute, Stiles doesn’t seem to know what to say, which is new. Then, Bart still clutched to his chest, he offers, “The jeep. You all keep bitching about Roscoe, but he was my mom’s.” He quirks those expressive lips into a smile that looks as tired as Peter feels. “She’s kill me for driving around in that deathtrap, but he was hers.”

It’s endearingly childish, the way he seems to think one secret makes up for another, that there is any sort of equality, any sort of fair trade in these things. Ripping his own chest open doesn’t leave Peter bleeding any less, silly boy. 

Then he takes two steps forward and passes Bart to Peter without missing another beat. He fetches the things Peter left with the turtle, piles them into the bag they came in, holds it out to Peter. 

All he says is, “If you need a sitter again, just fucking ask next time, yeah? No more Moses baskets.”

And Peter, god help him, just nods. Nods and says, “Thank you.”

Stiles smiles that smile again and Peter leaves in silence. 

Bart, finished chewing up his piece of carrot, starts in on his shirt collar instead. Peter lets him. 

+


	8. check the guns at the door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cywscross asked for assassin!Stiles, Steter. I sort of got hung up on backstory and barely made it to the pairing, but...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is a line from Twenty One Pilots' Heathens, _just because we check the guns at the door, doesn't mean our brains will change from handgrenades_. Excellent song.

+

So, secret sharing time, Stiles’ dad is not actually his dad. Or rather, he is his dad, but not his father. 

His father died when Stiles was five from a knife wedged between his ribs and straight into his heart. Stiles knows that, because he watched his mother put it there. 

After that, they run. Apparently, the mob isn’t very forgiving of people murdering their own, much less a woman who is supposed to be seen and not heard and take her hits silently. They run through Europe and all the way to America, then zigzag their way across the entire country, never stopping.

By the time they reach the West Coast, Stiles knows how to fire a gun, how to disappear into a crowd, how to use a knife to slit a man’s throat and a dozen other things. Before his mother became a mob bride, she was something else entirely, and she tells him no child of hers will ever be defenseless. 

(By the time they reach the West Coast, Stiles has used what he has learned three times. He stopped crying after the second.)

They stop in a little place called Beacon Hills, only another in an endless row, but there is a difference. Just one. 

A deputy who likes to eat in the diner where Claudia works. He speaks a few words of Russian, by way of his Polish parents, and he makes Claudia laugh. He makes Stiles laugh, too, and Stiles hasn’t laughed in a long time. 

(There was a bad man and a garrote wire and a gun too big for his little hands.)

They stay.

Within a year, Claudia has a new name to solidify her cover and Stiles is adopted, name changed, birthday moved forward. (Six again. He’s okay with it.) He’s as safe as his mother can make him and for a while, he thinks it’s going to be okay now. 

Claudia never does. The lessons continue, moving from evasion and defense to offence, until Stiles knows everything she does and can beat her in a spar two times out of five. 

No child of hers will ever be defenseless. 

+

They don’t tell dad. They never tell him because mom says dad is good, and knowing what mom used to do, what she is teaching Stiles to do (what he did do), would break him. 

So they don’t tell him, don’t even talk about it at the house. 

In hindsight, there are a lot of things they never talk about. A lot of which they should have. (Stiles is okay, but he’s never quite right, not really. Even the other kids can tell. All of them except one.)

+

Stiles only asks about his biological father once. Just once. He asks what he was like, before he threatened to murder his only son to keep his wife on a leash and his blood covered the kitchen floor.

“He was a monster, love,” his mother says, her head turned away from him.

“Then why were you with him?” he asks. In English. Always English now. No-one gets to know where Stiles was born. 

“Because he was beautiful, too.”

He doesn’t get it. She says she hopes he never will. 

+

Three months later, she gets diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and Stiles is suddenly alone with their secret, alone with a language he’s not allowed to speak and knowledge he’s not allowed to impart. Alone with a man he loves, a man he calls father, and the ghost of another man who bled out at his mother’s hands. 

He doesn’t deal very well. 

Not for a while. He’s angry and scared and alone and grieving and he wants to avenge his mother, but how do you kill a disease?

Then comes Lena. 

Lena, who is an old friend, someone he called Auntie, once. She helped them, when they were still running. (Did they ever stop?)

She comes looking for Claudia, because there is a job and she could use a partner, and finds only her son. She speaks Russian to him and Stiles…

Stiles makes her take him, instead. 

She doesn’t want to. He’s only twelve. But Stiles knows everything his mother did and he is angry and ferocious and no-one will ever suspect the little boy in the corner. 

“Your mother would murder me for this,” Lena laments, already giving in.

“My mother is dead.”

+

His mother is dead and Stiles is left with blood and murder and mayhem in his head, with the memory of the feeling of blood under his naked feet as he ran toward her and his father’s body, the faces of the men she (they) killed as they ran, and the feel of her hand, growing limp in his as she fades to nothing. 

And then a Russian assassin sighs and puts a gun in his hand and _aims him_. 

+

He pulls five jobs with Lena, putting the money toward paying his mother’s hospital bills off so dad will stop drinking so much and working so late. 

Then Lena disappears and Stiles knows better, by then, than to look for her. 

He holds still for six months, to be sure whoever came for her isn’t coming for him, too, and then he puts what he learned from her to use, too. There is a network out there, of assassins and guns for hire and his mother was one of them, once, one of the greatest, until she fell for a monster and left them behind for a child. 

Lena gave him the part of Claudia’s legacy Stiles never could have touched alone and he plans to honor it. 

Besides, he’s a thirteen-year-old with detailed knowledge on how to mutilate, murder and dismember human beings. He doesn’t really fit with the usual teen crowd.

+

And then there’s motherfucking werewolves. 

+

Which is interesting, because Stiles suddenly understands why Lena told him to never, ever take a job flagged in the system with a little dog head symbol.

And also fucking annoying because they smell blood, ruin his dumping grounds and make it impossible to get out of town for a job that takes longer than a day. 

Also, shit keeps trying to kill Scott, and Scott is pure and sweet and everything butterflies and rainbows and so Stiles has to defend him and that means he slips up.

More than once. 

Scott doesn’t notice because Scott is long since inured against all things Stiles and everyone else is too self-involved. 

Except for Peter. 

Peter fucking Hale, whose killings are sloppy and messy and a little bit beautiful in all their savagery. Until the man starts fucking with Scotty, Stiles is tempted to find the other people responsible for the fire, and giftwrap them for the man. 

But then, that would probably ruin Peter’s fun. He seems like a guy who enjoys the hunt more than the finale. 

So Peter mucks about and Stiles counters him when he gets too close to Scotty and it’s all fine and dandy until the parking garage. 

Until Peter has him bent backwards over a car containing a dead body, claws at his neck, threatening Scott. 

It only works because the other man isn’t really expecting it, but Stiles kicks out his knee, twists away and then rabbit punches the werewolf in the neck hard enough to break bone. 

Peter goes down and Stiles kicks him in the face for good measure before drawing his backup knife. Soaked in wolfsbane. 

The wolf stills as soon as the scent hits him and Stiles grins, a little too widely. “You know,” he says, conversationally. “I would have let you do your thing. No skin off my nose if you kill a few mud breathers. But you just couldn’t leave Scotty alone, could you? Over and over and over!”

“McCall is mine,” Peter argues, eyes glowing red and Stiles rolls his eyes so hard his entire head moves with it. 

“Well, he was mine first, so bad puppy! Shoo! And consider this your last warning. You even breathe in his direction, I will murder you, understood?”

Peter, still lying on the concrete floor, and looking disconcertingly comfortable down there, too, smiles. It’s not a nice smile. “I knew there was something off about you,” he drawls, “But I never figured it would be _this_ amusing. My nephew thinks you’re the harmless one.”

At least someone buys the act.

Head cocked to one side, Peter finally straightens to a seated position. “I wish I had bitten you instead. You would have been magnificent.” He pauses, straightens his cuffs and rolls to his feet. His hurt knee crunches as bones realign. “I’d offer now, but I don’t think you need any more claws, do you, Stiles?”

“Dude,” Stiles says, pointing with his knife. “Just get the fuck out of here?”

Peter laughs.

+

Three hours later, Kate Argent is dead and Peter is burning and screaming and burning and screaming and Stiles thinks he understands, what his mother meant, when she talked about beautiful monsters.

When Derek slits Peter’s throat, Stiles almost feels something like regret. 

+

Three months later, in the false light of predawn, Stiles stands over a panting, groaning, dying Gerard Argent, his favorite knife in hand. 

He prefers long range weaponry, usually, because there is less chance of leaving evidence behind, and blood is a bitch to get out of clothes, but this is personal. 

He crouches down on a level with the old man, ignoring the sting of his bruised ribs (can’t even hit right) and conversationally offers, “You know, I checked the system for you. You’re worth a lot of money, to a lot of very angry, grieving people.” He taps his knife against his knee, makes a mock thoughtful face. “I think I’m going to use that money for something _good_. Like helping a bunch of werewolves through college. And buying weapons to defend them. And killing other hunters. You know, stuff you’d hate.”

“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” Gerard wheezes, between great, wracking coughs. 

Stiles giggles. “Yes. You should have.”

Then he grabs the old fucker by the hair, twists his head back and makes sure there is no way he will ever turn. 

Slow clapping from the shadows. Stiles wipes his knife clean on the dead man’s shirt and twists to look at Peter, newly resurrected.

“Are you going to kill me on Saturday?” he quips, straightening with a little wobble. Maybe the old man knew how to hit after all. Ouch.

Peter smirks. “Clever, murderous _and_ sassy,” he compliments. “You are quite the catch, aren’t you, Stiles?”

He shrugs. “You’re welcome to try and find out,” he offers, then wiggles his knife in the air. “If you’re a brave little zombie.”

He laughs at his own joke and then turns away, hobbling back to his car. He has a bounty to collect and, from the look of things, a few werewolf traps to set up. 

No way is he going to make this easy for the big creeper wolf. 

+


	9. Time Warp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> theidiotwithnoname asked for time travel Steter with Peter instead of Stiles going back. I negotiated for both and this happened. Warnings for mildly cracked Stiles and his really very fucking potty mouth.

+

It’s not really a last-ditch-effort-to-save-the-world thing. The world isn’t ending. At least, not the world at large. 

Their world? Stiles has lost count of how many times that ended and all the things they lost, in the fire and otherwise. 

It’s really more of a we’re-fucking-done and a bit of why-the-fuck-not and can’t-get-worse. It’s the hyphen apocalypse! He snorts at his own awful joke.

Beacon Hills is a warzone and has been for a decade. That fucking tree is blasting come-hither vibes to the entire hemisphere and they have been fighting for so long that Stiles can’t remember what his body felt like before the bruises. The Argents are long gone, all of them, including Chris, who was the best of a bad lot. The Calaveras made it a bit longer, but not all that much, in the grand scheme of things. Eichen House fell years ago, and all its inmates, including Lydia, with it. Kira and her family are ashes, the remaining Hales, except Peter, are long buried. As is the rest of the pack, human, werewolf, and anything else. 

There’s nothing left, except them. 

Stiles and Peter against the world. Literally. They have scars and rage and power in spades and nothing left to fight for. 

So why the fuck not, right?

Stiles does his hoodoo one last time and Peter gets a shot at keeping that goddamn fucking tree gagged and quiet and maybe shit’ll get better. Maybe it won’t. In either case, Stiles won’t be patrolling dead streets anymore, because Stiles will be undone. This Stiles, at least. 

If he manages to punt Peter back far enough that he’s still Alpha, the man can fix all kinds of fuck-ups. He’ll probably do it in his bloody, slightly psychotic way, but really, these days, it’s the only show in town. 

So Stiles smiles at his last packmate across the ritual circle, chants in archaic he doesn’t even know what the fuck language and with a snap and snarl of power, flings Peter as far back into the past as he can manage. 

Then everything goes black. 

+

It doesn’t stay black for long, just a beat, an endless, single beat and then there is light and sound and feeling and motion. Fast motion. 

“What the fuck, Stilinski!” Jackson, to the right. In the passenger seat. The passenger seat of the Porsche. Jackson’s Porsche. Jackson’s been dead almost as long as his fucking car. 

Jackson’s dead and Stiles is behind the wheel of his car and fucking hell, Peter messed with the spell. Peter tweaked it, somehow and now here Stiles is, instead of or and?

Fuck him. 

He was supposed to happily await his undoing in Nightmare Future Land while Peter, the lazy ass, did all the hard work. Fuck him. Seriously. 

He jerks the car to a halt and jumps out, running on some sort of sense memory of that night. The Night. 

The night Peter died. 

And there he is, middle of the clearing, lifting Scott up like a ragdoll and Stiles, Stiles acts on reflexes ingrained a decade deep and braces himself on the open car door to shout, “For fuck’s sake, Peter, put the teenager down!”

Scott drops like a hot potato and Peter shakes his – really grotesquely ugly – head like a dog trying to dislodge water. He growls darkly and then, abruptly, shrinks back into his human form. 

Which is naked. Peter in his thirties is hot.

Also, “I forgot how weird you look without your Disney villain goatee.”

“Fuck you, Stiles,” Peter remarks.

Jackson, precious little flower that he is, chooses that moment to throw one of the Molotov cocktails Stiles forgot about. Peter catches it out of the air, and, lesson learned, flings it right back at Jackson, who ducks with a squeak. It lands on the soft, loamy ground, unbroken. 

The Alpha – Jesus, Peter is a real life Alpha again, this is going to take some getting used to – looks around, frowns and idly scratches at a patch of dying blood on his chest.

“Cutting it a bit close, aren’t we?” He shoots Stiles a look full of red eyes. Because he’s a dick.

“Well, _someone_ messed with the spell, didn’t they?” Stiles sneers right back and then makes his way around the car to where Chris is just waking up and starts disarming the man. 

Yes, even the knife in his boot. And the garrote wire in his watch. And the second gun in his pocket. “My, Chris,” he croons, out of habit, “is that a gun or are you just happy to see me?”

The horrified expression on the man’s face as he scoots back, confused and concussed and a variety of other ‘con’s reminds Stiles that early days Chris was really kind of an uptight idiot. He sighs, empties the gun of bullets and chucks it in the underbrush. 

Everyone is watching him with wide-eyed and awfully bamboozled expressions. It’s funny. Stiles giggles. 

“Stiles?” Scott asks, very carefully, looking between the no-longer-rampaging werewolf and the suddenly-very-weird best friend. Look, more hyphens! “What’s going on?”

Stiles waves at him.

Hesitantly, Scott waves back. Which is awesome, because five minutes ago, Scott was a rotting corpse in the ground. So was Derek, who comes launching out of the Hale house with a snarl and full game face on, only to be smacked down like a naughty puppy by Peter. 

The man studies the hand that batted Derek away with a pleased grin on his face. “I love being the Alpha,” he comments, idly. 

“Curb the psychopathy, or you’re sleeping on the couch,” Stiles remarks, then frowns. “Hold on. We don’t have a couch anymore. We don’t actually have a home anymore.” He looks down at his body. “You fucking asshole,” he hollers, “I’m sixteen again! Peter, I hated being fucking sixteen! I was a walking mess of spastic hormones!”

Peter does this eyeroll thing that requires his entire head. “You’re still a walking mess of spastic hormones at twenty-six,” he counters, calmly. “The only difference is that you’re better at directing it.”

Finally, Chris has enough. He rolls to his feet, pulls out another backup knife – whoops – and aims it at Stiles. Meany. 

“What the hell is going on here?!”

Stiles flaps a hand at him. “I’m mad at Peter. He was supposed to do this whole time travel schtick alone, but no, Peter I Am The Alpha Hale just had to be a dick and change the spell around so now here I am, and I’m fucking sixteen again. Do you remember being sixteen, Chris? It sucks donkey balls, even without supernatural creepy-crawlies trying to murder you ever other day. I’m sixteen! It’s a fucking disaster!”

He flings his arms wide for emphasis. He has a chicken chest!

Quietly and under his breath, Derek mutters something about washing his mouth out with soap. Is he swearing too much? So fucking sorry. But he just got time traveled against his will by his dickbag packmate. He’s entitled.

“Time travel?” Jackson asks, faintly, from where he’s still half crouched behind his car. Precious puppy. 

“Yes,” Peter answers. “So I’d appreciate it if you could all calm down,” he flashes red eyes at Derek, who thinks he’s subtle as he tries to sneak closer, “and stop trying to kill me. Stiles and I are here to try and keep you all alive, after all.”

“We die?” Scott asks, faintly. Skipping right to the important parts. Good man. 

“Gruesomely,” Stiles confirms. “Bloodily. Viciously. Some of you got eaten.” He thinks of the Wendigo SNAFU of 2016 and almost gags. 

“That bad?”

Stiles closes the distance between them and claps Scott on the shoulder. “Dude. We literally came back in time to change it. How bad do you think it was?”

Allison finally seems to get over her shock. She shakily raises her bow toward Peter, who gives her a Bitch Please look. Even the newly bitten Erica wasn’t impressed by arrows. “You killed Kate.”

Speaking off. Stiles holds up a finger and jogs inside, grabbing the bitch by the arm and hauling her outside, where he breaks her neck and lets her body drop. “Right. That should keep her down this time. Now, what did we do with the body last time?”

Everyone is staring. Allison is crying. Whoops. 

Peter snorts. “I was dead at this point last time, my dear. Improvise?”

“Mhm. Yeah. Chris?”

“She was already dead,” the hunter snaps, tense as a wire, eyeing his weapons on the ground. White-knuckling his one knife. Stiles rolls his eyes.

“Yeah. No. She wasn’t. Claws of an Alpha. She turned. And let me tell you, werejaguar Kate? Actually worse than your regularly scheduled psycho bitch. I did us all a favor here. Speaking of,” he points a stern finger at Derek. “If you ever, for some reason, find yourself with Alpha powers, do not, under any circumstances, bite anyone without running it by me or Peter first. Your taste in betas runs toward homicidal maniac way too often.”

Jackson. Kanima. So not fun. Erica and car parts. Isaac and scarves…. You know, this might actually be a pattern. Was Derek subconsciously picking people with more hang-ups than him the whole time?

Not the time!

“Aaaaanyway. Body. We pinned the murders on her last time, didn’t we? How did we, right. Alli, I need your necklace.”

He holds out his hand expectantly and after getting a tight nod from her father, she passes it over, still in a fugue state of shock and confusion. He rips the chain and drops it next to Kate’s body, kicks around some leaves… yeah, good enough. 

“Alright crew,” he starts, only to be cut off by Chris. 

“I want an explanation. A rational one. Now!”

Peter snarls viciously and Scott stumbles a few steps away from him. Stiles sighs. He misses the adult versions of his friends. The ones that were used to Peter being his murderous self and appreciated his effectiveness. The less innocent, battle-hardened, loss-burdened versions. 

And damn, does that makes him feel guilty. Isn’t that why they cooked up this whole scheme in the first place? To make it better?

He sighs and puts a hand on the werewolf’s arm. Immediately, Peter’s eyes fade back to blue. The wolf curves himself around Stiles’ back, holding on to him like a teddy bear. Or, you know, an anchor. 

What? There was nothing else left.

“You know, you were actually a lot more laid back after everyone you loved was dead, Chris, my man” he comments and then bites his tongue, hard because that was a bad thing to say, wasn’t it? He winces. “Sorry, sorry. Too much magic, I’m sort of a little bit, possibly, a smidgeon high as a fucking kite right now.”

Peter pats him on the head with a clawed hand. Which might be the reason no-one else says anything.

“Okay,” he decides. “Okay. Explanation. But first, can we go to Mae’s? I haven’t had Mae’s pancakes since the whole place blew up that one time with the pixies and I’m hungry. Also, food might help me calm down.”

Blank looks. Derek’s actually got his mouth hanging open as he stares at Peter scenting Stiles. Like they’ve never seen that before. 

Wait…

“What?” Stiles looks around, frowning. Right. "Pants. Peter, you need pants so we can have pancakes.” He pokes at the man’s ribs, earning a nip on his neck. “Pants!”

Peter snorts. Chris looks horrified. Allison, Jackson and Derek seem confused. Scott whines under his breath. 

But none of them are running away or trying to shoot people or plotting murder or turning into lizards, so it’s all good. 

Now if only Peter had some goddamn pants!

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: Guys, guys, guys. Before you ask some more, yes, I love you all, and you're wonderful enablers and I'm turning this into a full length fic (oh my god, why??!?). Just give me a couple of days. Maybe a week. There might even be plot. I think.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Into the Woods](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7690810) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)




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